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Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the focus-is-everything dept.

ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"

4 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Way to restate the summary, Cpt. Obvious! by spun · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary: Redhat sells support rather than licenses
    You: With Redhat, you buy support
    Me: Duh.

    So the fact that people who use the software keep buying support for it is not that impressive.

    Um, duh? The article is not claiming, 'Ooh! Out of all the people who buy Redhat, look how many people buy support!' It is saying, 'Look how many people buy Redhat in the first place.' Redhat has continued to profit during the economic downturn, which is impressive. Come on, man, any hobbyist will use CentOS, or create their own update server, and/or download the patches and updates from another source. Any corporation or government will buy support. But they won't necessarily buy Redhat, in fact, most of them end up buying Windows, right? But enough buy Redhat to ensure Redhat's profitability. Which is the point of the story...

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  2. Re:I don't buy it. by spun · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.

    --
    - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  3. Re:To be fair... by 1729 · · Score: 5, Informative

    To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers.

    To be even more fair, Red Hat employs many of the prominent Linux developers, and is currently the biggest corporate contributor to the kernel. In addition, they're heavily involved with GCC and gdb, not to mention MANY other GPL projects.

  4. Re:Because they haven't released an OS in 3 years by h4rr4r · · Score: 5, Informative

    If the old one works fine why would you need a new one?

    In the grownup server world we really don't need flashy new guis or other such silliness.